Travel

Last updated: 2025-02-28

After traveling to various cultural sites for some years, I found a rule of thumb for finding good spots to visit: check if something is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sometimes this leads to obvious suggestions (Vatican City, Paris, Amsterdam) but more often than not visiting world heritage sites has shown me sites that are very much worth visiting but not as touristy as the usual sites (e.g., Bologna, Orange, Albi).

At first, my enthusiasm led to the dream of visiting all world heritage sites in Europe, but this dream soon showed to be too ambitious. All EU countries then? Still quite a lot. Some narrowing down brought me to the following goal: visit all world heritage sites in the continental part of the original member states of the European Union. Achievable, but also ambitious, with Germany, France and Italy as the biggest obstacles. Since then, I’ve been using this as a heuristic in planning vacations.

(Of course, I still travel outside of these guidelines as well. Occasionally this leads to another world heritage site, and these are also included in the below map)

Lines mark separate vacations. Lines in grey mark planned vacations, lines in light gray are trips I’d like to make someday

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Progress:
Total:       [++++++++++..............................] 45 out of 175

Netherlands: [++++++++++++++++++++....................] 6 out of 12
France:      [++++++++++++............................] 15 out of 47
Italy:       [++++++..................................] 9 out of 60
Belgium:     [+++++++++++++++++++++++++...............] 10 out of 16
Germany:     [+++++++++...............................] 13 out of 54
Luxembourg:  [........................................] 0 out of 1

Note: due to transboundary sites the sum of all countries might not match the total